Frontline Health

The Shocking Truth About Hormones with Dr. Lindsey Berkson

• Troy Duell

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 1:00:10

Send us Fan Mail

We sit down with Dr. Lindsay Berkson to connect the dots between hormone decline, endocrine disruptors, and why weight loss gets harder with age even when your diet and exercise are on point. We dig into practical ways to cut daily chemical exposure, what hormone testing should look like across life stages, and how hormone delivery choices can change symptoms and long-term health.

• Dr. Berkson’s path from early health consciousness to unexpected cancers and a lifelong focus on hormones and the gut 
• What endocrine disruption means and why DES still matters as a model compound 
• Three high-impact exposure cuts: shower water filtration, avoiding heated or reused plastics, taking shoes off at home 
• Why detox can restore hormone response and create real hope for fertility 
• Perimenopause and low hormone signaling showing up earlier than most clinicians expect 
• The “calorie deficit” argument versus obesogens and “nasty” fat cells that resist weight loss 
• How to think about bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and testing beyond symptom relief 
• Delivery modes explained: topical, oral, vaginal, injections, pellets, and choosing what works for the patient

Get $100 off the Everything Breast Cancer and/or Everything Hormones courses by Dr. Berkson and Dr. Brownstein with discount code: PC100FRONTLINE

Links to Dr. Berkson's Courses: 

Thanks for listening to this edition of Frontline Health by Centurion. Remember, you are your best health advocate.

Learn more about our products at https://centurion.health/

Use discount code: FRONTLINE15 for 15% off your first order!

Subscribe to our newsletter: https://centurion.health/pages/podcast

Follow us on social media:

TikTok - @frontlinehealthpodcast

Youtube - Centurion Health

Facebook - Centurion Health

Instagram - @frontlinehealthpodcast

X - @TheCenturionWay


Why Hormones Affect Weight

SPEAKER_03

Today on the Frontline Health Podcast.

SPEAKER_02

Part of losing weight when you get older is balancing your hormones because when you lose your hormones, it's harder to lose weight. And the other part of it is detoxing from these chemicals that are making your fat cells nasty. Your hormones, they're your physiologic Wi-Fi. They send all the emails to your cells to tell your cells what to do. And when they're not working right, your Wi-Fi freezes and you get pathology or disease, or you get accelerated aging.

SPEAKER_03

I'm Evan Patrick with Troy Duell, founder and CEO of Centurion Health, and we are also very pleased to welcome special guest, Dr. Lindsay Berkson, today. We're excited to have Dr. Lindsay Berkson and excited for the conversation ahead.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, super excited to have her. She has spent 35 years studying the subject of hormones and health from every perspective, kind of as a scientist, a clinician, a health advocate, and she has become an author, a lecturer, and a scholar through all those years and has been in practice as a nutritionist since the mid-70s. That's right. I said the mid-70s. I know she doesn't look like she would have been in practice since the mid-70s, but she's also been an integrative

Meet Dr. Lindsay Berkson

SPEAKER_00

nutritional and gastrointestinal and endocrine specialist since the early 80s. And she specializes in really keeping up on the science of nutrition, on hormones in particular, and health, and how to really translate that into how it can affect your life, how it affects the way you shop and your personal health. And her goal is ultimately to help you and us discover the weakest links that are holding you back from being all that you can be and allow you ultimately, which is a big part of what we do, to take greater ownership of your health. She consults all over the world with doctors around the world as well as individuals, and also becomes part of personalized healthcare teams. And I really became acquainted with her as she was speaking at a peptide conference a few months ago in Arizona and knew that she would be able to bring some incredibly valuable advice and information to our podcast audience. So, Dr. Berkson, thank you for being here. Super excited to have you.

SPEAKER_02

It's great to be here because it's so confusing. There's so many voices, a cacophony, all bumping into each other and not agreeing. And at the same time, we live in a toxic world. And many of the providers, I teach mostly CME courses for MDs and nurse practitioners, and we all say it's harder and harder to get patients well today. So what's going on? And how can we translate that into more effective lenses through which to see our patients and help our patients?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, that's that's an amazing mission, uh, Dr. Bergson. And uh, I think really what we're just very curious about, you know, getting things

From Ayurveda To Cancer Wake-Up

SPEAKER_03

started out is what led you down this path and how did you get started?

SPEAKER_02

Well, you want to go back there, do you? That's a long time ago. You know, I'm gonna be 78 in a few months. And um so when I was young, I heard that there was a lecture by this very interesting fellow, and I used to want to find very wise older people. You know, we the movies and media make older people look like doddering idiots. But the truth of it is that they're a wealth of resources, especially if they're somewhat iconic. And there was a man going to be speaking at the Theosophical Society, his name was Scott Neering, and he was gonna be talking on longevity, and I think this was in 19 uh, it was about 1969, right when I was graduating college from the University of Michigan, if you can believe that. So I went up to Northern California because at that time there weren't a lot of people into all of this, and so when a new name emerged, I wanted to go meet them and see what they had to say. Our elders hold incredible wisdom. And he said, Your body is a temple. What you eat makes a difference of your experience throughout your life. So I started eating organically, and then the Beatles came back from India, and the Maharishi got them all excited about meditation and living a life of consciousness. Consciousness and energy were just brand new terms. In fact, people put you down if you talked about energy. They thought it was ridiculous, and they said you're a granola hippie. But um, that made sense to me. So I became a yoga teacher, and then I went and lived in India and I studied Ayurvedic medicine, and I became a yoga teacher for many years, and I lived in ashrams and ate organic food and did the organic gardening for the 200 people in the ashram. And I was doing everything right. We yoga emphasizes detoxification, so lots of detoxification, going out in the desert, gathering my own chaparral, drying it, doing high colonics. I mean, things that are kind of trendy today. We were doing that back in the late 60s and the early 70s, and all of a sudden I get breast cancer. What the heck? I'm doing, what the heck? I'm living a way that when someone is diagnosed with cancer today, which of course is the new tsunami that we're facing, that's what people do. They change from a bad American standard American diet to what I was already doing. So I was doing everything right, but getting the wrong outcomes. It didn't make any sense to me. So I also was very entrenched because of that lecture by Scott Nearing. He was so phenomenal. He was credited with starting the organic gardening movement. And Elliot Coleman and myself worked with him in his in his huge farms in uh Maine at Forest Farms. And now Elliot has taken on the mantle of carrying what we call the organic gardening movement. So, way back when we were doing organic gardening, we were building law cabins, the law cabin I built and felled the trees myself and gathered the sphagnum moss to put in between each chink, um, it's still people still live in that. So it was that old era of health consciousness, but then my health went south. And at the same time, I had the honor, because I was always looking for these elders that had wisdom. That's what you want, you know, is when people have lived something for a long time, they're like a huge encyclopedia of pearls of wisdom. So I bumped into Dr. Jonathan Wright, who's now credited with being the father of bioidentical hormones, and I did a rotation in integrative medicine with him and Alan Gaby, who actually wrote the very infamous nutritional medicine book. And Alan and Jonathan have been my friends now all my life. I've written 21 books, and Jonathan has written the foreword for many of those books. He just closed his clinic last April 2nd, and it was an icon just closing. But he said, and I did a rotation with him in 1977 with Alan, and he said, the gut is the epicenter of health. Actually, my book, Healthy Digestion, the Natural Way, published by Wiley, sold a million copies, and I think that was published in the 70s. And he said, Hormones rule the show. So I have been testing 24-hour urine and hormones. I've been in practice one way or another, I hate to say this, almost 55 years. It sounds totally crazy. I'm still kayaking and dancing. I just ran here from the gym to fit the gym in this morning. But um, so I've been looking at hormones, looking at their interplay with the gut, looking at their interplay with the body. And then I wrote one of the very first books on endocrine disruption. And right about that time, my book Hormone Deception, I got diagnosed with breast cancer. And it made no sense to me if I was doing everything right. What the heck was the universe giving me such a wrong answer? And I got invited to be a distinguished hormone scholar at the very first estrogen environmental think tank at Tulane and Xavier Universities called the Center for Bioenvironmental Research. And these were a group of scientists who were the first scientists looking at how the environment is adversarial to our hormones. And when I got this cancer, I got a very rare type that no one else in the United States had ever had before. And then I went on and got kidney cancer right after that, that nobody else had had before. And when I was at Tulane, Retha Newbold, who was one of the major researchers at Research Triangle Park at Duke, she said, you know, Lindsay, those are exactly the same tumors that in our lab, when we expose pregnant animals to the model compound of endocrine disruption, diethylstabesterol, which the nickname or the acronym is DES, they get exactly those tumors. Are you a DES daughter? Now, I just written one of the very first books on hormone disp on endocrine disruption. Three came out in three months together. No one knew about endocrine disruption until these books came out. Nobody. The only way we learned about it, there was nothing in Google, nothing in books, was to go to scientific symposiums all over the world. So for six years, that's what I did to write hormone deception. And the other two books were My Stolen Future by Theo Coburn and Hormone Chaos. They came out in three months. And I got a call from Tulane saying, we want you to be a scholar here. That book was friggin' phenomenal. And um, they offered me a free PhD, but then immediately I got diagnosed with breast cancer. So Retha said to me, I and I'd already published the book on this phenomena of endocrine disruption, which means endocrine, your hormones, disruption, they're they're getting futzed with from the environment or you know, what's sprayed on your food, what's in chemtrails, what's in, you know, pharmaceuticals, etc. So I didn't, I didn't,

DES And The Rise Of Endocrine Disruptors

SPEAKER_02

I knew the topic. I wrote a book, but I had no idea I was a victim of the very phenomena that I just written a book on and was now a scholar at a think tank where I'm working with the scientists who discovered the first estrogen receptor, the second estrogen receptor, Elwa Jensen and Yanaki Gostofsen were shoulder to shoulder looking at hormones and their relationship to the environment. So I wrote away for my mother's birth records. And I got them six months before Michael Reese Hospitals shredded everything and was torn down. I was so lucky. And there in my mother's birth records was that she was injected with diethylstabesterol twice in the first trimester, which is the most vulnerable stage of pregnancy. And she also took a um prenatal vitamin, which they put DES in 365 prenatal vitamins, because at that time it was the first synthetic estrogen, 50 times more powerful than our own endogenous or man-made estrogen. So they thought this is so cool. Estrogen's cool, and this is going to make a normal pregnancy even better. So in that hospital, they gave a lot of women injections of this if they were spotting. And I didn't realize that I was a victim of the very topic that I wrote my book on. It was an eye-opener, let me tell you.

SPEAKER_00

So, uh, Dr. Berkson, is that something that they still are not still doing any of that today, are they?

SPEAKER_02

So this is the deal. That is such a great question. It's illegal. It was banned in 1971 as the most cancer-causing molecule ever invented. And my mother got it twice when she was pregnant with me and in her prenatal vitamins. But um, it makes meat taste phenomenal.

SPEAKER_00

It makes meat taste phenomenal.

SPEAKER_02

Meat, and it's dumped in it, used to be dumped legally in feedlots because it fattens marbles meat up, and beef beef from animals fed DES taste melts in your mouth. And so when I was at Tulane, um, a shipment of meat was given to Switzerland, and they always test all the meat that comes into that country, and they test now it's been banned since 1971, and after that I was at Tulane at the think tank. And there was a shipment of American beef that went to Switzerland. They tested it, and it was just filled with DES. So John McLaughlin, who was my mentor, who was the world's expert on estrogen at that time, he's now retired. I think he him and his wife, Christopher, are in Europe right at this moment. Um he he said, let's ship it here and let's really take a look at it because it's being illegally used in meat to make tea meat taste good. But by the there was no shipment, it got mysteriously lost from Switzerland to Tulane. And he wanted me to do an investigative journalistic piece because actually what hormone deception was was a deep dive investigative journalistic piece on endocrine disruption. So he wanted me to do it on that, but that book took me six years, so I wanted to go on to do other things. But we realized that there's a lot of DES being illegally dumped in beef because it tastes so good. So I really go out of my way to pay extra for organic beef because that I know that you can still get DES, which is banned from 1971. And it was one of the reasons that my whole life took, I couldn't have children. The daughters exposed in the first trimester were infertile. So there was a class action suit. And if you could just prove that your mother took it and you were infertile, you got a little bit of dough. But then I got breast cancer and kidney cancer, and it turned out that many other DES daughters got breast cancer exactly in that same time frame, between 40 and 46. And um there were a few of us that got that kidney cancer. So it was set up in the womb from the epigenetic change of the endocrine disrupting effects. So DES is now called the model compound of endocrine disruption. But you know, they don't even teach it anymore in med schools. No, in fact, you go to any young doctors, they don't know what DES is. And I believe it's because big pharma sponsors most of med schools, and they want women to be comfortable with being injected with a vaccine, or you never should take anything when you're pregnant, nothing when you're pregnant. And they want you to be comfortable, so they're not gonna teach. It's rare when somebody knows about it. I I can't say that every single graduate doesn't know about it, but when I go to younger doctors and I say I'm a DES daughter, which is the term, and there's DES daughters and DES sons, they look at me with a deer in the headlight look. I had one OBGYN, and he was like in his late 70s, like me. And he said, I know of that stuff, and he he just retired six months ago because almost all my peers are retiring and sipping my ties by the pool. Well, I'm working full-time because I'm on a mission.

The Three Biggest Daily Exposures

SPEAKER_03

Hey, Frontline Health family. If you're enjoying this conversation, please go ahead and like this episode and subscribe to the Frontline Health Podcast. It really helps us reach more individuals who want to take ownership of their health. And comment down below what is a health topic you'd like us to investigate in a future episode. Leave your suggestions in the comments, and I promise we do read all of them. Together, we're building a community that values health stewardship. And now, let's get back to the episode.

SPEAKER_00

I like it. So uh go into the DES, do the DES sons, were there fertility issues with those? Uh their sperm was altered.

SPEAKER_02

They had a lot of different um they had the but they had a higher incidence of prostate cancer. We think endocrine disruptors have a, you know, it used to be that prostate cancer just happened to men in their 60s, 70s, 80s.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And now we've had some cases of young men in their 20s. We're seeing colorectal cancer in 16-year-olds. I mainly consult with breast cancer patients now. And um, I just had a breast cancer patient who was 16 years old and an ovarian cancer patient who was 20. And these are from this starts in the egg and the sperm and the womb. It's not starting, you know, in their life, it's be their pre-life when they were all the elements that help you form who you're gonna be as you move through your life. And that's why it's so important to have consciousness about this and know what to do to reduce exposure and also detox. So the last third of my book, Hormone Deception, is about how to get this stuff out of your house, out of your body, because your home is the biggest source of pollution. Thank God you have something you can do about it. And um you have to be just like you want to take a multivitamin or you want to take a number of nutrients to support you daily, detox and trying to reduce getting bad stuff into you, bad stuff meaning that which can futz with your hormones and futz with your genes and cause epigenetic damage, that's that's a goal that everyone needs to now have to try and stay healthy in this very dirty, toxic environment that we live in.

SPEAKER_00

So, what would you say if you were to pick the three top things to detox from or to avoid altogether? What would you say those three things are?

SPEAKER_02

Okay, well, there's more than that, but I'll I'll keep you.

SPEAKER_00

I know there are a ton. I'm I'm trying to limit simplify. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_02

So the biggest exposure is in your shower.

SPEAKER_00

Your shower.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, because your pores get wide open from the hot water. And modern or contemporary treatment plants aren't set up to filter out the metabolites of pharmaceuticals, birth control pills, hormones. So when you're staying, and there's also trihalomethanes that are formed by natural organic material. I write all about this in hormone deception, but a shower filter, in fact, when I was writing hormone deception, it was so clear to me that water, because you have water aerosolizing from your dishwasher, you have it aerosolizing from your washing machine, it's not just your shower, but your shower is the biggest because you're standing under hot water for five, 10 minutes and your pores are opening, so you're just slurping it up, so to speak. So um a local shower filter that you change every six months, or a whole water filter. So when I was writing Hormone Deception, I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I got in touch with a water company and I said, we need reverse osmosis for the home. And we invented the first reverse osmosis whole home water system, and we we even added back in calcium and magnesium under the sink so it wasn't totally mineral-free, which is a little bit harsh on your heart. So that was back in the day, and now, of course, there's lots of water systems, but shower in the bathroom, and then your pores are so wide open, and then you use all these personal care products in the bathroom. If you look at a woman's countertop, there's all these bottles of things, and you've just made your pores right open because you've enjoyed that hot shower. If you don't have green products, and honestly, you know, perfume is got, you know, almost all perfumes have phthalates, which are highly linked to uh fetal abnormalities, especially in male offspring. And uh they're an all-perfume. So you want to use essential oils, you want to use green products, you want to use as little as you possibly can. When I lecture, people always say, What do you use on your skin? What do you use on your skin? I go, nothing. I use tea tree soap or something. I don't use anything on my. I try and minimize all this stuff that they're trying to sell to you. I've never used a deodorant because I've eaten so cleanly, I don't have that issue. And the way you smell and the way you look, a lot of that is an end product of your choices throughout the day, of your food choices, your exercise choices, but less is more with your body, you know, a few quality products, but not, you know, people are selling you this thing with, you know, you need to do one, two, three, four, five on your skin. It's it's most of these products have a lot of endocrine disruptors in them, and you've just opened your pores from the shower. So the bathroom in the morning is a one of the big sources. The second one is microwaving food in plastic or putting it in the dishwasher, microwaving plastic and then consuming it. So one of the biggest things that happened at Tulane that all the news in so Tulane's in New Orleans, and all the news stations in New Orleans came. We had cameras everywhere, this and that. Because I always forget, I think her name was Shanna Brown. I always forget the name of the scientist that did this study, but she took a plastic container, just a plain plastic container, and she put it in the dishwasher with regular detergent, not green detergent. And if you want to know which detergents are great, go to the environmental working group. They're working hard to let you know what's going on. You can figure all this stuff out on your own through EWG, the environmental working group. And she just put water in it. So she put a plastic container in the dishwasher with like cascade, something like that, which is a regular detergent, not a green detergent, not to you know, point only a finger at cascade, it was what I thought of. And then she put water in it and she fed it to pregnant animals. And so all these effects are transgenerational. They are passed down to the next generation, even if the exposure is only with the parent. And all the next four or five generations were infertile from just drinking water that had little micro tears in the plastic that were releasing the estrogenic molecules from the phthalates and the bisphenol, et cetera. And Shanna Swan used to come to Tulane a lot. She's in her 90s. She's still on the lecture tour like I am. God bless Shanna Swan. She's a fertility expert. And she goes around, I think she was just on the Mark Hyman show. And she, you ought to have her on your show too. And she talks about how, you know, sperm counts have been going down, fertility rates have been going down. And a lot of it is due to exposure to endocrine disruption, from the egg and the sperm of your mom and your dad to your shower, to your food choices. But don't ever reuse plastic that you put in the dishwasher to put any liquid or food. That's the second one. And the third one is you bring in the outside pollution on the bottom of your shoes and it goes right into your home. So, Cornell, I talk about this in hormone deception. Cornell University did these intricate studies of measuring people walking into a house, having just gone to the grocery store, parked in the parking lot, walked around the grocery store, they come in the house, they walk in, and in three minutes, from the bottom of their shoe, there's lead, there's cadmium, there's phthalates, there's all this junk that they could measure on your master bed pillow case in three minutes. So they did all this intricate study of how to get these things off your shoes. And they said, wipe, have a mat outside, wipe four times, have a mat inside, wipe four times, then take off your darn shoes. So taking off your shoes like the Japanese do, so those top three things really do help reduce exposure.

SPEAKER_00

That's incredible. And thank you for

Detox And Fertility Hope

SPEAKER_00

sharing that. I was gonna say, if if you've had years of exposure and you have this transgenerational um delivery of infertility that that happens down the path, just to give listeners hope, is there a way to overcome that once that's in the I guess in the genetics of those individuals as it passes on? Can people overcome it?

SPEAKER_02

That is a great question. So you're saying is there hope? Yeah. So at Tulane, they I was at Tulane for about 10 years. I don't know. I can't remember exactly how many years I'm terrible with time. And I think it's on purpose now since I'm getting so older, I don't want to think about my age. I just want to think about being alive.

SPEAKER_01

But you're doing a great job of it.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you, thank you, thank you. So Tulane put on about 33 years of conferences, and the first 18 or so were called estrogens in the environment. It was an environmental estrogen think tank. What does the environment do to your hormones? And estrogen was really the first hormone that we started to look at, but it it affects all of our hormones from testosterone to insulin to oxytocin to everything. So um they the last few conferences, and most of the people who came to the conferences are usually three to five hundred people. They were usually the the heads of environmental health science programs from major universities, like you know, Penn State or uh the University of California or Stanford, the heads of those environmental science departments were who were uh attending, and they would hear all these negative side effects, and they started at the evening five o'clock cocktail schmoozing parties to get drunk. I mean, really drunk. And John McLaughlin was such a smart mentor of mine, and he asked all of them, why are you getting face drunk? And they said, We think there's no hope, that the world's doomed. So, John, the last few conferences that I participated in, they all changed the name from uh estrogens in the environment to e-dot hormone. So the last few years were called e-dothormone. And the very last one, John said, I don't want any discussion of the issues of chemicals. I only want remediation ideas for hope. How do you get this stuff out of our planet? But he didn't talk about how do you get the stuff out of our body, which I'm gonna go to in a minute. And all they did in the poster sessions and in the presentations, so poster sessions are usually um people who present their data, but they didn't get into the main stage. And then there's those that get on the main stage. And in these scientific conferences, each speaker usually has five to ten minutes, and they go through maybe 30 speakers in a day. It's really fast. It's like um speed speaking, so to speak, like speed dating. So um, there were so many ways to get this stuff out of the planet, out of our water, out of our fish, out of our food. It was shocking. So many incredible, beautiful minds that we have here in the United States that and some scientists came from other parts of the world, but mainly it's mainland United States scientists, and this was all scientists. There was hope. There was incredible hope. The only thing is you need regulatory action that has to be voted in by the politicians. So you have to vote for politicians that see this as an issue, and that's what Kennedy's been trying to do, and everyone's been frigging vilifying Kennedy. Shame, shame, shame, shame. Don't listen to CNN and mainstream news, listen to podcasts like this. And um, and the other one was you got to have the money to pull all the stuff off. But on a personal level, you can get this stuff out of you. So, Shanna Swann, back to Shanna, who's in her mid-90s and run around all over the world. She just came back from lecturing in Europe and now she's on Mark's show and this and that. She was able to take women who couldn't get pregnant. She's a fertility specialist, and a lot of that infertility is due to chemicals in your body. So she put women on a program instead of IVF. Forget about this five hundred thousand dollar IVF program, gathering your eggs and this and that. Let's clear the chemicals out of you. And in two and a half, three months, she got the majority of women pregnant. Wow, just by clearing the and there's and I just got invited to I just came back from a European lecture tour. And the reason I was there was I got contacted by this group of gynecologists in um Holland and in Paris, and one of them runs a fertility clinic. And she said, I've been looking at Shannon Swan's work and the idea that pollution is making women infertile, and IVF is so expensive, and we don't have a really high success rate with it. So I did 30 women and I gave them your detox products. That's all I did. My detox products cost about 80, 90 bucks a month. And she put 30 women on my detox products, which I designed because of this issue, and and because I designed Metagenics first Femline in 1982. So I've been formulating supplements since 1982. And I I love to cook, and formulating supplements is kind of like a recipe, like cooking. And it and it, you know, if you're in the literature, you understand what to put in things. And um, then they did 30 women with IVF, and they got about 35% of women who were successful with IVF in three months. And with my products, they got 28 women pregnant in one month.

SPEAKER_00

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_02

Just by clearing off the toxins that didn't let the hormones work that support pregnancy, progest, progesterone, pro to support just gestation. Progesterone is the hormone of pregnancy, and it there's many anti-progestins in the environment. So that's why I got invited. They said, we want to tell you the open-ended research that we've been doing. And we're we we hear that they're not so toxic over there, and we're the most toxic country in the world. Yes, we have glyphosate. You know, thank you, Stephanie Senna, for letting us all know about the downstream negative issues with that. But I was shocked to hear how polluted Belgium was, how polluted France was. They are dealing with the same issues and with patients who don't get well. So the first thing they now do is they detox them so that then they can respond to the treatments. And they were using my products of all things. I didn't even know they were doing this over there. And it was really such a wonderful, my heart was so pleased, you know, that if my expiration date comes

Menopause Myths And Hormone Testing

SPEAKER_02

up, you know, I've I've done some good on the planet.

SPEAKER_00

That's that's great. And and along those lines, you you mentioned fertility and kind of the detox there. I think when you follow that up, the next stage of life with women anyway, and I I was talking to several women saying that you were coming on and that you're a hormone expert, and they were talking about menopause. And they said, Why do I have all this weight gain? Why can't I get this off? What do I need to do? Do I need to go with bioidentical hormones? What are your when you talk about hormones and menopause? Um, they talk about being lethargic, you're clearly not lethargic. They talk about their skin and hair, and you're clearly not having an issue with that. So, what is it from a hormone standpoint that women can do and maybe even work on or tell us about some of the misconceptions with bioidentical hormones? Because I know breast cancer is one of the things that you hear a lot of people who haven't really been in the literature and understanding it. That's the one thing that they go, yeah, stay away from those because it it causes cancer in the long run or other issues. So, how do you typically respond to that? And and what would you say for somebody going through menopause and uh working with that right now?

SPEAKER_02

Great question. But the surprising fact is this holds true for both genders. This holds true for men as well as women, and the whole idea that it's hormone consciousness should be mainly focused on the stages of life called perimenopause, which is usually the stage where you're not ovulating consistently for about 10 years before postmenopause. And postmenopause is usually when you haven't had your period for a year. Those are the classical definitions. But all that's gone now, because we have young women going through perimenopause in their 20s, and we don't have providers trained to identify it, and we have insufficient hormones in 13, 14, 15, 16-year-old kids, and they have all around the world. I've been lecturing on this for about 15 years now. All around the world, there are papers written that young girls, young boys have less and less hormones, and hormones ride on Ubers called sex hormone binding globulin, because hormones aren't dissolvable in blood. So they got to get inside an Uber. They got to get their phone out, get an Uber, jump into that Uber. But if you got too many Ubers and too much of your hormones are in the Uber, they can't get out. So there's a phenomena that everybody's writing about in the scientific papers, where 13, 14, 20-year-old kids, 20-year-old is a kid to me, have lower sex hormones and higher Ubers or sex hormone binding proteins, which equate to no hormone signals. And your hormones run the Wi-Fi, they're your physiologic Wi-Fi. They send all the emails to your cells, like the Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks show, you've got mail. They send mail to your cells to tell your cells what to do. And when they're not working right, you your Wi-Fi freezes and you get pathology or disease, or you get accelerated aging. And um, the most interesting article to me was um from Harvard and General Mass. It was published about 12 years ago, I think on around 170 young girls from 13 to 24. And everyone, all young girls want to be thin, thin, thin. We all want to be thin, thin, thin, flat bellies. I don't know what this is with this big muscle, you know, phase that's going on, but I'm trying to keep up my muscle mass too. And uh and so um a lot of young girls do a lot of exercise, but many young girls now have anxiety, insomnia, body dysphoria, gender confusion, as well as osteopenia, loss of bone, that we used to only see in menopausal women. We didn't see this in old in younger women. And if they do functional MRIs, the areas of their brain that are supported by estrogen are shrinking. So they present like women in their 50s and 60s, but they're 14 years old. So Harvard and General Mass gave half of these young women hormones, just like you'd give an old woman or an A, a mature woman. I'm not an old woman. And um half of the women got placebo, and the young girls on hormones got rid of their body dysphoria, their anxiety, their it in usually within a week or two. I didn't even want to go off their hormones when the study ended. And they they published this in a psychiatric journal first because anxiety is so high in young women, and all their anxiety went away on hormones, because hormones have a lot to do with how you see the world and how comfy you are in the world. And um, so honestly, and we just had Marty McCary in January do a huge call for declassifying testosterone as a controlled substance. And in that talk with a multiple number of experts, Abraham Morgenthaler being one of them that I've had the honor to lecture with in Miami at the Trump Dural Hotel, but they took the name Trump down about two years ago. And um, he now said something that holds true for everybody. He said, We test lipids and glucose from 11 years old and onward. Every time you go in for a physical, you get your lipids tested, you get your glucose tested. Every single person should have their hormones and their binding proteins, those Ubers, tested from 11 years old and on, because everybody knows younger and younger people have less and less hormones. So I just want people to understand that hormones aren't just about older age and perimenopause and postmenopause. You can go into perimenopause. I there was an ACOG conference, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, uh, about 12 years ago where they presented quite a number of cases of women in their 20s with perimenopause, but nobody knew how to identify it because nobody thought that could happen. So the doctors didn't have the lens through which to diagnose it when the patients came in and they just said you should go see a psychiatrist and go on anxiolytics, right? I mean, that's the answer. So we're raising generations of doctors that just, you know, present medications and they don't really. I mean, gynecologists who we all go to for hormones, they're great at delivering babies. They're great at female surgeries, but they're not trained in female health at all. They're not trained in hormones at all, and they only give out birth control pills, which are part of the problem. So we have a problem in our, it's it's a systemic medical school problem. But then if we get back to menopause,

Obesogens And Weight Loss Resistance

SPEAKER_02

it's harder and harder to lose weight in 2026 than it was in 1976. It really is for everybody, and that's based on the work of Bruce Blumberg out of the University of California, Irvine. Um, I I met him at a Cooper conference, uh, and then I met him at Tulane, and then I interviewed him on my podcast. Uh and I had a podcast, but when I had doctors that talked against the vaccine, 40 of my podcasts were taken down and my bank account was threatened.

SPEAKER_01

Yep.

SPEAKER_02

And I'd already gone through something like that when I was younger, and I didn't want to go through it again. So I put it on hold for a while. But he he showed that these chemicals in the environment, if you don't keep detoxing them, they make your fat cells nasty. And then these fat cells are harder to break open and lose weight. They get resistant to any of your weight loss efforts. So he called he renamed these chemicals obesogens, and he based his work on one main chemical called tributylin, which used to be painted on the bottom of ships, and it's in all our fish that we eat. I mean, fish was a perfect food till we dumped all this crap in the oceans. Excuse my language, but it's exasperating. So tributylen used to be painted on the bottom of ships, and he took pregnant rodents and exposed them to the amount of tributylen that you'd get from eating like three fish meals a week. Because fish is good for you. So go to the store and buy salmon and buy shrimp, etc. And you're getting some tributylen along with microplastics and many other things, which now we're starting to develop answers about how to move this stuff out of us. But um, so he only exposed the pregnant rodents, and the next four generations were all obese. Obese. And he fasted these little rodents for four days. Now, a fasted rodent, a tiny little rodent, has such a high metabolic rate, four days of fasting, it should just go down to skeletal. And he had a group that wasn't exposed in utero from the pregnant mom, and they were fasted next four generations, and they all went down to just bone skin and bones. But the group that had been birthed to the parents, to the mom that had been exposed to this on one chemical, and we're all exposed. The average American woman has 300 chemicals in her amniotic fluid, a healthy American woman who's getting pregnant. If she hasn't done any detox, she got an average of 300 chemicals in her amniotic fluid, her placenta, and her breast milk, and that's been well proven. And all of those animals couldn't lose weight. So part of losing weight when you get older is balancing your hormones because when you lose your hormones, it's harder to lose weight. And the other part of it is detoxing from these chemicals that are making your fat cells nasty. And I wrote an article on this in depth in the Townsend letter, their last paper issue. And you can just put fat cells in my last name, Berksen, and that article will pop right up and you can read it for free.

SPEAKER_03

That's great.

SPEAKER_02

Is this too much information? Am I giving too much information?

SPEAKER_03

This is fantastic. And I actually wanted to zoom in on one thing that's that you're talking about here and ask if maybe you could dispel a myth that I see perpetuated online a lot. Um, a lot of people, when they're talking about weight loss, they will want to dismiss kind of the hormonal element to it that you're talking about, and they'll say, you know, it's it's just as simple as if you want to lose weight, you need to be in a a caloric uh a caloric deficit. Uh so can you help explain what's kind of going on there and why it's why it's more complicated than just being in a caloric deficit and how that kind of shakes out in the body and what and and why people kind of have that misconception?

SPEAKER_02

That's a great question, and it makes all of us frustrated. Like DES daughters, there's several pay papers on DES daughters where we got that wallop in the womb and it created epigenetics. genetic change mean it took our genes and it elbowed and hit them and our expression of those genes has altered a little bit as we grow up. So we end up having a harder time if with being thinner we tend to be fatter. And in fact when I had Bruce Blumberg on my show, I said, well what if someone like me who's a DES daughter where we had this exposure in the womb and he goes, she goes, you have to eat less and move more. And that's what I've had to do in my life. But no longer does that work and it makes people so frustrated. My ex was an ER doc and he was a major almost Olympic level athlete. And he would always say, you know, calories in, calories out, if you just eat less and move more, you lose weight. Well that's not true anymore because these endocrine disrupting compounds are making us have nasty fat cells and they're anti-androgenic pro testosterone helps you burn off fat and ups your metabolism. Many of these compounds lower levels of androgens. One to put you more at risk of breast cancer, two, it puts you more at risk of having love handles you just can't get rid of. So this exasperation of weight is a real entity. It's often not the woman's fault. I have patients come in all the time and they'll say I'm eating under you know 1100 calories a day. I'm working out they show me their diet diary, their exercise diary, they're doing everything right and they're getting the wrong outcome like I was when I was younger eating organic, eating well and I was getting cancers. So what we have to do detox is a big part of losing weight and hormone balancing and replacement if you're insufficient and looking at your binding proteins and we also have other things in your blood that we can look at is our hormones really taking you back to a 30 year old physiology or not? It's not just symptom relief. We have ways of looking at your blood. I learned this from Angela DeRosa. I had her on my podcast it was one of the best things I ever learned. She teaches hormone classes all over the world she's a hormone expert and she was able to show us how to look at your blood to know if your hormones are taking you really to a younger physiology and younger physiologies do in fact burn off more calories than older physiologies. So it's complex and people come in frustrated as heck because everybody wants to feel like you know when you're tighter and leaner and meaner, you feel better when your clothes fit better. And it has a lot to do with energy for I'm a small frame and if I'm carrying a few pounds extra it's fatiguing and exhausting and I don't feel as well. It's very real. But now you've got to go about it with an intelligent approach. And it's really often my patients are very sophisticated by the time I see them. They've already gotten a great food they've already given up this food sensitivity, this that they're very sophisticated, but they're not getting the results from what they're doing. So we've got to do a deeper dive and and usually never 100% with anything everything is individualized per patient. Part of that is detoxing because chemicals make your fat cells nasty and work against you. So you've got to figure out a way and you can now measure what chemicals you have in your body vibrant wellness has an incredible toxic panel that tells you what was in there. And in fact so I just did a four-year contract at Dr. Pearl Mutter's old clinic in Naples, Florida. And I started a breast cancer program and a renal program because of kidney cancer I only have one kidney and that got me into the kid I ended up working at a dialysis center here in town. I invented a drug with Dr. Moncrief who co-invented the home unit of dialysis. I went into kidney land for a while. So I went to Naples to do that and one of the internists there was named Dr. Maristani. And Dr. Maristani just sent me his podcast where his now ex-wife she was then his wife she couldn't lose weight she couldn't lose weight she couldn't lose that last 15 pounds. So he used vibrant wellness to take a look at what chemicals she had in her blood and she was just shockful. And in in the olden days Starbucks uh used BPA lined paper cups to serve coffee and she always drank a Starbucks coffee. Now they've removed that I don't know what they have lined it and all the BPA alternatives are also not good, but they've done something better at the moment. But she was a Starbucks fanatic as many of us had been early on when Starbucks first came on the scene and she had all these chemicals in her blood even though she was upright and looked healthy but she couldn't lose the last 15 pounds. So he detoxed her detoxed her detoxed her and over the next year she lost the 15 pounds and then they broke up and now he's engaged to somebody else. So that's

Choosing The Right Hormone Delivery

SPEAKER_02

life.

SPEAKER_00

That that is incredible and then and Dr. Berkson I know we we have a short amount of time left but uh wanted to really ask a couple of questions on uh hormones themselves because a few of the ladies that I talked to they were wondering which is better to do the topical to do the pellets or to do the the oral and didn't know if you had an opinion on that. I I told the ladies that I would certainly ask um the expert these are such great questions you're asking yeah so what what's your thought on on those three forms of hormones and does it does it matter?

SPEAKER_02

So what you're talking about are delivery modes. Like how do you get this hormone stuff into me? And there's many delivery modes there's oral which is mucosal there's sublingual which is against your cheek there's injectable there's topical which is on your skin there's vaginal which is first vaginal pass there's pellet which is you insert something hard for a you know th three to four month period and it goes up your hormone levels go up and then kind of come down and then you wait for another insertion and there's soft pellets called the MBK pellets and the vagicerts and the pearls. So I have a substack called Agile thinking and I write on all this and I happen to really do in the last week a really deep dive into all hormone delivery systems, et cetera. And mostly OBGYNs and nurse practitioners uh follow me on my substack, but you're welcome to do to do this even as a regular wonderful wonderful person out there because almost nobody in medicine knows any of the stuff anymore. So the main thing with the delivery mode is finding a delivery mode that works for you and finding a provider that has knowledge of all these. But the most typical used and the most successful for the most women is usually on the skin. But the skin isn't designed to absorb hormones so you have to rub it in for 60 seconds. In five minutes it completely goes into the skin I've heard all these ridiculous podcasts about the evils of transference that's BS it goes right under the skin in five minutes and the pharmacokinetics of that have been studied by Dr. David Rosensweet who's one of our best hormone experts and he started the Institute of Bioidentical hormones which I'm on the board. And of all things he was one of my doctors when I had breast cancer 32 years ago so I've known David for 30 plus years and he's a good smart honest dude and he does a lot of studies about how hormones get absorbed. So skin is great but if you use skin ideally you want to put it on twice a day to keep up your blood levels of those hormones. The patch is great because it keeps up blood levels but the patch only gives you estradiol. And David and myself and the other David David Brownstein we co-sponsored two CME continuing medical education courses for MDs and nurse practitioners last year called Everything Hormones and we just finished this April Everything Breast Cancer with 15 speakers about what else can you do besides allopathic care for breast cancer. I really wanted to do this before my expiration date was up because I'd had breast cancer and I care about my sisters of my heart and because there's no reason they shouldn't be on some hormone. Every breast cancer patient should should be able to be on testosterone it's it's insanity that they're not so we talked about the issue of hormone replacement and breast high risk breast cancer patients and what does the science really say I have two really close friends David Brownstein he's a family practice doc in Michigan and David Rosensweet he's a family practice doc and now he's mostly teaching the menopause method. And we've all been diving into this diving into this I mean we have all made hormones our entire focus for decades. And what you're talking about is delivery mode. Both of them mostly use the skin. I take my hormones vaginally but it's much more nuanced and it's much more difficult in a woman that has a uterus I don't have a uterus so I don't have those difficulties. A pellet there's pros and cons to the pellet where you insert it and you put it in every few months but a few of my patients love the pellet that's the only way they get the benefit. So really it's finding the result that works for the patient. Treat the patient more than the laboratory. There's no right or wrong with delivery it's what really gets rid of the symptoms and then when you look at the blood work you can see that their physiology is going from a 68 year old woman to a 35 year old woman. God bless Anna Durosa. We all learn from each other and you know a lot of people try and claim all the all the uh awards for these nuances these pearls it's all a group think and we learn from each other and the best best doctors don't have egos and the worst worst doctors even the gynecologists have egos and they give lies on social media and they make everyone confused and they badmouth everybody else and the women listening to this it's very confusing to know who to believe who to believe at all so um there are some really givens but but a the delivery mode of hormones is based on the delivery mode that works the best for you where you feel better your symptoms go away and when you look at your blood work not just reference ranges you see that your blood work is taking you to a 35 year old because that's what you want. That's anti-aging integrative regenerative medicine making us healthy. I mean look at me I don't mean to be bragging or anything but I had a hell of a time I had breast cancer I had kidney cancer I battled blindness we're not even go going to go into that story. I have had they they promised me they wouldn't take out my adrenal gland they usually in the era that I had a nephrectomy and my adrenal kidney removed they always at that time also did an adrenalctomy where they took out your adrenal gland and my surgeon promised me with my best friend present that he wouldn't take it out but he did because it's a shorter surgery and he didn't make more money for the extra 20 minutes it would take. So I've dealt with adrenal um I I had adrenal collapse and insufficiency much of my adult life and I live a very big life. So I have had a lot of stuff hit the fan the average woman would be decimated. I couldn't have kids the average woman would be decimated. I missed out on marrying some of my love of my life because they wanted me to be able to have their kids I mean it's just the DES it's been a huge huge journey to go through all this but in my older age I get now to enjoy the youth that I didn't have when I was younger and I'm out there I have the best intimacy the best life the best activity but it's because I've taken my hormones to the highest individual level that takes my physiology to the youngest level but you know I had breast cancer if I saw any doctor up till now they would say you can't be on hormones and I would have been a puddle on the ground of clothes, bones and shoes because with no hormones for decades I would have been ruined. So we have to figure out how not to get ruined and how to get better. And that's by working with doctors that think and a lot of doctors today are trained with allegorithms and protocols and not thinking. So that's why I like these shows because people the people who listen to your show they get in on these conversations and it helps you think you gotta think for yourself and hear a lot of people and find it's not easy to find the right practitioners but find them and you can do that. They are out there and be the best version in this bodysuit you can be because life is a gift and why be aching and shuffling along which many of my peers are rather than having a glorious time. So I came from horrible illness and tr and strife and it was hormones have ruined me because diethyl chresterol was a synthetic hormone. It kind of ruined the fate of my journey and now hormones have saved me. So that's why at this age I'm still circling the planet and glad to do it glad to do it happy to do it because I couldn't have kids so it's my legacy I love these conversations and we're all in this together it's not easy for any of us to find the best um providers but you can do it you can do it there is hope and you can be the bet better better version of yourself but you got to find your right you know your right um the right group of providers to help you achieve that.

SPEAKER_00

Dr. Berkson one of the things we always say is and always ask our guest is what's one thing you would suggest to take ownership of your health but I think you couldn't have said it any better than what you

Resources And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_00

just did. So I I don't even think we need to ask the question but probably the best way to to hang this up and to kind of put a uh a bow on it is how can people get more information, get your books or get to your stuff?

SPEAKER_02

So my website is dr lindseybergson.com D R L I N D S E Y B E R K S O N You can scroll down and see everything hormones, everything breast cancer. I have a pro group of six years long where doctors meet with me now and pharmacists and nurse practitioners and naturopaths um and a few chiropractors of twice a month and I write in agile I write in a substack called Agile thinking I have 21 books out my latest book just came out uh four months ago called Oxytocin medicine and I gotta go.

SPEAKER_00

Dr. Bergson, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you. This has been a lovely conversation and you asked amazing questions and I'm sorry I have to hop up so rapidly. So blessings to you both and blessings to everyone listening.

SPEAKER_03

Thanks Dr. Berkson thank you so much Dr. Berkson and to our listeners thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Frontline Health podcast by Centurion Health. As always we want to encourage you to go out and take ownership of your health because you are your best health advocate see you next time